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Should Schools Teach Personality?


A response to Should Schools Teach Personality?

The push to discipline, while seeming 'good for kids' is questionable for several reasons:

  • Why not teach openness to ideas, another quality shown correlated with academic performance.
  • Conscientiousness is a slightly more conservative quality, while openness is a liberal quality (it is the stronger correlate of political viewpoint), and this just seems to push the same negative conservative agenda.
  • The blame for failure is simply pushed further on to students, without any awareness about larger societal issues and/or social issues impacting one's ability at discipline.
  • Teaching personality might have secondary negative effects


As to the last point, I have read of a study showing an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and fluid intelligence, and an increase in g with some dimensions of intelligence, although it was not verified in a follow-up study:

Original: What Facets of Openness and Conscientiousness Predict Fluid Intelligence Score?

Attempt to verify: Personality-intelligence interface : the relationship between conscientiousness and intelligence



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